Jara Pascual - Innovating and Collaborating in the Digital Era: The Role of Emotional Intelligence for Innovation Leadership and Collaborative Innovation

ISBN 9783110665116

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110665383

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110665567

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

To Christian, Ilse and Rafael.

For my family and friends who are always there when I need support.

And for the Collabwith Community and team that inspired me to write this book with our conversations, meetings, interviews, user platform interactions and feedback.

Innovation and collaboration are among the most important concepts that drive human society forward. Jara Pascual explores their interplay in a unique way, with the chapters walking through the richness of the topics like a Mediterranean food market, full of colour, diversity and flavours. A remarkable, engaging and satisfying read.

Johan Kestens, CIO New York Mellon Bank

Jaras voice is rigorous and inspiring on how to manage organizations in the current era. Indeed, there are strategic reasons for diversity. And indeed, good leaders are not just smart, but emotionally intelligent. A MUST READ!

Elena Arrieta, tech & innovation journalist. Currently working as Communications Manager at DigitalES, the Spanish Association for Digitalisation.

Jara Pascual is opening a new box for innovation. I was intrigued about the connection of Emotional Intelligence and business in particular in a startup context. Everyone is looking for recipes for personal and professional success and this approach might be the key for both.

Sabine Stuiver, Co-founder and CMO Hydraloop

Jara Pascual, with colleague Celia Avila-Rauch, has been able to distill and apply the ability model of emotional intelligence to the art and science of innovation and innovation leadership. In our work we note that feelings are not always facts but that emotions as a form of data. More than that, emotions can assist or facilitate with decision making, creativity and innovation rather than getting in the way, but only if leaders are smart about emotions and develop and deploy their emotional intelligence skills.

Dr David R Caruso, Emotional Intelligence Skills Group, Founder Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Research Affiliate

The opportunity to write this book arose at a time when I had witnessed the outcome of quite a number of academia/industry collaborations. Some collaborations are more difficult than originally anticipated, others become dysfunctional, and some take too long to get started. None of these scenarios is desirable, and it does not have to be this way. Hence, I was starting to look deeply into the core reasons, issues, excuses and problems surrounding these collaborations, as well as what journey academics and professionals went through to make a collaboration successful. I found that innovation is often not well understood, and in many cases, underestimated.

I wanted to write a book explaining all the secrets of how to make a collaboration successful while describing the reality and getting to the point of all the issues without excuses. The funny part is that I first created an online platform to digitize and automate the collaboration process as much as possible. Curiously, the processes, interfaces and user interactions from the platform have been a guide for designing the canvases and the structure of this book. For instance, the core of this book is the Collaboration Journey with the Collaboration Canvas: this is the information architecture from the platform with its make request button functionality.

In this book, I have compiled, summarized and structured all the learning and opinions I received in endless conversations, interviews, and feedback sessions from professors, researchers, startup owners, entrepreneurs, innovation managers, innovation directors, students, accelerators, knowledge transfer offices, innovation consultants, partners, and policy makers (and also included my own experiences). I address this book to you, an actor inside the innovation ecosystem. You may be a professional wanting to do things differently, or an academic who wants to bring his research results to life, or you may be an innovation manager who is orchestrating the innovation ecosystem. Or you could be part of a startup which wants to change the status quo, an organization which helps society with its services. This is a book for beginners in the area of innovation and also for experts. Either way, you will learn the fundamentals and the next level on innovation leadership and rediscover the importance of innovation.

You will find years of experience condensed here into the form of best practices and canvases that will help you to transform your team, organization, ecosystem and industry in a very structured way for your collaborations, your entrepreneurship journey, your innovation projects, your research projects, your innovation consulting, your innovation development and your transformational projects.

Also, this book features more than 20 conversations with industry leaders, entrepreneurs and academics who share their perspectives in every chapter. I included these because it is particularly important to showcase role models and heroes who are doing things in a different way and who really are transforming their society, their industry and their organizations.

To start off a conversation between you and me, the reader will also find quotes from my podcast interview series Business of Collaboration which are worth mentioning throughout the book.

It is impossible to do innovation alone, and hence collaboration is critical to make it work and to bring innovation to the market and cause a positive impact. This book shows that if we are working together, we are going farther and faster.

I am grateful to many people and organizations. Thank you to my husband, Christian, who supports me in all the projects with his courage, time and understanding. To my two children, Ilse and Rafael, who are the best cheerleaders and support for my work and ideas, and who at times understand that I need to work and cannot be disturbed. To my parents, Pepe and Maribel, and to my sister Diana and my brother Eric. And to my grandparents, who always supported me, even if they did not understand what I was working on, Jos and Joaquina.

Special thanks to Celia Avila-Rauch because she supervised the emotional intelligence concepts and reviewed a great number of chapters in this book and provided valuable feedback and guidance on emotional intelligence skills. We wrote Chapter 4 together, and also created the Emotional Intelligence Canvas, the Selling Innovation Canvas and the contribution to the guidelines to overcome fear when asking for your fee in Chapter 7. Thank you for our endless and wonderful evening conversations, lovely WhatsApp audio recordings, and tons of texts.

Thank you to Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates for reviewing the bias on web explanation in Chapter 2, and Prof. Bart de Langhe for reviewing the behavioral economics graphs in Chapter 7. Thank you Constantijn for our insightful and philosophical conversation.

I would like to make a special mention of my appreciation to Virginia Vila for the philosophical conversations about visualization, ecosystems and platforms. To Ginger King for being the cheerleader behind the scenes. To all my friends who are always listening to my crazy ideas and support me without questioning! Mercedes Medina, Neus Font, Raquel de la Pea, Olga Krieger, Jess Gonzlez Mart, Asun Cauh, Jimena Saporiti, Sandra Loewe, Irene Lpez de Vallejo and Eulalia Nadal.